The Orphaned and Separated Children’s Assessments Related
to their Health and Well-Being Study

The OSCAR Study

UNICEF estimates that there are 153 million children in the world who have lost or both parents. While the numbers of orphaned children have been decreasing in most regions of the world, they continue to rise in sub-Saharan Africa, partially due to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. ‘Separated children’ are those whose parents are effectively absent from their lives, in essence rendering them virtual orphans (of note, the definition of ‘separated children’ has evolved since our study started, to reflect the alarming number of children fleeing conflict in Syria and elsewhere, and who are unaccompanied by their parents or guardians).

The Orphaned and Separated Children’s Assessments Related to their (OSCAR’s) Health and Well-Being Study is designed to evaluate different types of care environments for orphaned and separated children and adolescents, and understand how their care environments affect their physical and mental health. In Phase II, we are collecting the costs associated with different care environments, in order to measure their cost-effectiveness.